Responsible tax dollar management: end job creation grants

While the nation is focused on the auto bailout, there has been a long history of politicians handing out our tax dollars for “job creation” without any responsibility. Promise “job creation” and get free money.

However, when you don’t create jobs, or even lay people off, the tax dollars don’t come back. Read this about UltraCell in Vandalia.

When the Ohio Third Frontier Commission awarded UltraCell Corp.’s Old Springfield Road manufacturing operation $1 million in March to ramp up production of fuel cells, Frank Beafore, the company’s vice president of operations, said then that the money would help him add 25 to 30 jobs by the end of this year.

Instead, hard times are forcing UltraCell to lay off local workers, just days before the company this week announced another grant, this one from the U.S. Department of Energy.

Jeff Vorwerck, 56, said UltraCell laid off six to seven workers in the last week of November, including himself.

There have been others, recruited with tax dollars, only to go belly up. The fiasco that Citywide Development underwrote in the West Fifth Street YMCA (I can’t remember the name of the company right now)- cost millions.

How about real change from the Obama administration: let’s eliminate the tilted playing field and stop all tax dollar spending on “economic development” and concentrate Government on infrastructure and services.

In the auto bailout, the cost of health care is often cited as one of the reasons American car companies can’t compete. Instead of bailing them out of their bad business decisions- let’s just come up with a better health care system where insurance company CEOs aren’t cashing $100,000,000 paychecks- while costs continue to skyrocket.

In the meantime- is it too late for the government to get our “job creation” money back?

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